Then squish a filling inside using a pastry bag. You poke a hole in it and like a surgeon deposit the filling by squeezing the bag while simultaneously withdrawing the fill tip through the puncture with machine like precision.

But the chocolate cupcakes are better. With the white curly frosting on top of thin chocolate ganache. Those can be improved too.

The filling. It's like a whipped cream foam. Lemon custard would be better, or banana. But if you're stuck on white foam then real whipped cream. Or you could jab the can of spray whipped cream in there but then you couldn't control the flavor of it.

This is Crap!!! I shouldn't have to go through all that to have a Twinkie. It's the Republican, union-busting, filthy rich plutocrats that have taken away our Twinkies. "Let them eat Little Debbies," they tell each other with scorn.

Instead of Twinkies, Madison area (and southern Wisconsin residents) could support the endangered chocolate bismarck. Like euchre once dominated card playing, the bismarck--brought to Wisconsin by German immigrants--once dominated the pastry markets.

Last time I was in Madison they were getting even harder to find--Copps on the east side still sold them.

As usual the problem is more complex then the right wing picture. Continental Baking Co. has been bought and re-bought by venture capitalist who ran up $860 million in debt while paying the CEOs millions. I think a combination of the declining appetite for junk food, the the increased debt and the fact that one labour union did not want to take any more pay and benefit cuts from management that failed time and again to improve the bottom line. Interesting that the union did agreed to cuts if the deal included 25% share of the company and $100 million claim in bankruptcy, but that was not enough.

If you didn't get to enjoy a real Twinkie--the product sold in the 1960s and 70s that was pretty much the same as it was since it was created--you have no idea how good it was. The crap they have sold for the last thirty years or so would be better used as caulking.

A roesch/voltaire said...As usual the problem is more complex then the right wing picture. Continental Baking Co. has been bought and re-bought by venture capitalist who ran up $860 million in debt while paying the CEOs millions. I think a combination of the declining appetite for junk food, the the increased debt and the fact that one labour union did not want to take any more pay and benefit cuts from management that failed time and again to improve the bottom line. Interesting that the union did agreed to cuts if the deal included 25% share of the company and $100 million claim in bankruptcy, but that was not enough.nd

OooopsMaybe you better know who the actors are before you review a play.

here comes the Hostess twist: because Tim Collins of Ripplewood, was a prominent Democrat, a position which allowed him to get involved in the first bankruptcy process in the first place, due to his proximity with the Teamsters’ long-term heartthrob Dick Gephardt (whose consulting group just happens to also be an equity owner of Hostess). In other words, the traditional republican-cum-PE scapegoating strategy here will be a tough one to pull off since the narrative collapses when considering that it was a Democrat who rescued the firm, only to see it implode in a trainwreck that has resulted in the liquidation of a legendary brand, and 18,500 layoffs.

You know what a bankruptcy is right? the company is reorganized to satisfy THE CREDITORS. Not the unions or the employees.

Here's a tip for you union members in the audience.Never strike a company in BANKRUPTCY! They already have little to lose.Strike the company that can afford to meet your demands!Christ. I got to tell you morons everything.

Tastycake's have really gone down in quality since they started shipping them nationally. They were better when they were only produced at one location and you could only get them within a few hours of Philly.

There's something off about the texture of the new ones... not sure what they did to them!

I would expect that any buyer of the Hostess snack trademarks and recipes would likely be one of their competitors who have pre-existing factories and distribution, like Tastykake or Little Debbie, and the same with Wonder Bread, but in places where unions (and their job-killing practices) are not very popular.

No, no, no. The pendantic foodie in me can't let this go by and I'm surprised no one else has commented on it. Twinkies are not eclairs. Eclairs are puff pastry, choux pate, and twinkies are vanilla sponge cake.

Eclairs are filled with pastry cream, which is a semi-set custard, and twinkies are filled with vanilla "creme" filling.

No one who has eaten both an eclair and a twinkie should confuse the two of them.

Of the two, my children prefer eclairs, although they rarely get them (home made, anyway). They get one box of Twinkies to share every summer vacation. The first half-dozen go quickly, the others hang around and often get trashed.

I went looking for a Hostess cupcake today. Couldn't find one. Couldn't find a Twinkie, either. I did notice that Little Debbie now has two new products. One looks like a Twinkie. The other looks like a Hostess cupcake,right down to the squiggly line frosting on top. They were not available in single servings, though. Only in multi serving boxes.

But just for the record, the "cream" filling is not cream. If it were, it would go bad on the shelf in a day or two, rather than be able to withstand nuclear war and last a thousand years. Instead, the creme filling is largely shortening and sugar/corn syrup.

I think both the anti-union people (whom I often agree with) and the anti-capital people celebrating the death of Hostess are assholes.

As was noted earlier in this thread, the union was not looking for a 40% raise instead of a 25% raise. They were looking for a smaller cut, after they already took a pay cut several years ago. And my understanding -- though I'm less clear on this point -- is that they weren't being paid $100 an hour to play tiddlywinks. There was a union in Syracuse, NY, that voted their employer out of business a year or two back, in which a union member was quoted in the paper saying she would rather her employer go under than take a pay cut, because she had job skills that could easily get her $25 per hour -- after all, she knew how to type. She deserves to live in a ditch, or at least to learn first-hand why 48% of her colleagues voted to keep their jobs at reduced pay. But the handful of anecdotes I've seen here have not been like that.

Meanwhile, you know what you end up with if you invest in the equity of a company that pays a CEO a lot of money and ends up in chapter 7? Nothing. You know what you end up with if you invest in a company that pays a CEO a lot of money and ends up in chapter 11? Not much. The owners of this enterprise risked their money on the chance of a good return and rolled snake eyes. They presumably paid the CEO a lot because they thought that gave them the best chance of succeeding; apparently, it didn't work, either because they were wrong or just because they were unlucky. If you hate people who risk their money on distressed businesses that employ people to produce goods and services that other people want, I hate you.

Also, I don't know anything about this deal the union allegedly came back with, but I hope Roesch/Voltaire isn't suggesting that if a business can be resurrectable with a particular compensation schedule, then it can clearly be resurrectable with the same compensation schedule, but giving up 25% of the upside.

I do agree with much of what Roesch/Voltaire said -- I think this is a circumstance in which labor and capital and the customer base just couldn't come together to produce mutually beneficial trade, probably in large part because the customers' tastes have changed. Maybe better management would do better, or maybe not. Maybe a different labor force would do better, or maybe not. I suspect that someone will buy a lot of the assets and re-create a mini-Hostess, possibly using some of the same workers.

It is worth celebrating that we live in a society in which a company that can no longer serve its customers without losing money will be allowed to fail, so the resources can be put to better use. But at the level of the individual firm failure, it comes with a cost, both to the employees who have to find their more productive employment and to the financiers who lost their money (and who, if such losses were more common, might spend their money on yachts rather than on businesses). Until I see a good reason to believe either that the union was entirely irrational or that management's decision to close was justified solely by spite, I will feel bad for both groups and pissed off at those dancing on the graves of their dreams.